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Company blog relaunch. Best practices with Google Algorithm updates in mind?

We have a company blog living on our corporate domain. The blog contained many posts with keywords and we believe google is penalizing us for over optimization as we use to be ranked in the top 5 for our main keyword now we're on page 8.
Keeping this in mind, we are planning to relaunch the blog and we wanted to get some tips on best practices that addressing the following questions. Should we archive all of our previously published content and start fresh with this relaunch? Should we keep 50 or so published blogs visible? Where should this blog live (on our domain or a wholly separate domain)?
We'd love to get thoughts and opinions, and any insight about best practices for a blog relaunch.

5 Responses

Great questions - and although you ask several, I'm going to focus on one in particular. Keep your blog on your domain. It's the best SEO value you're going to get. Other structures just don't offer quite as much benefit.

It can get tricky as far as balancing keywords and optimization, however the domain authority, link juice and everything else is worth it.

Now, to your other questions - starting with over optimization. I'm hesitant to make that conclusion without any information. The basic-ness of your statement doesn't give quite enough info to be able to make a solid determination (IMHO) as many posts with keywords isn't in-and-of-itself a bad thing. If every post had a cramming of keywords so they were too loaded, then maybe but there's not enough info to really identify (is it over optimization or bad links? Or did the ranking drop in time to map to an algo change?).

Rank drops happened immediately following Panda update #24. We had roughly 800+ posts using keywords but all post were original. The individual post were not overloaded with keywords; one or two keywords per post.

Well, even without stuffing, there can be an impact. 800 is a lot, lot of content. And I'm assuming that there's a lot of similarities in the posts (I assume there's a central theme of the blog) which could be a contributing factor. Yes, other sites do this, and yes, that can also feel the impact if there's a chance that the search engine sees it as not Panda-friendly.

Now, when you say one or two keywords per post, are you referring to you targeting one or two different keywords per post (acme, acme products - for example) or only using the keyword once or twice on a page? The way your answer reads, I could interpret it that you were only targeting one or two keywords, however if you used them too many times in the post that would cause the over optimization....

It sounds like you got hit by Panda - let's avoid the "over optimization" word, as it's fairly imprecise in light of recent algorithm updates. It actually referred to Penguin, but it is confusing. So let's continue with the assumption of Panda.

If you had high-quality pieces that real people liked, were particularly well written, still receive traffic, or received a lot of coverage, save those. If you have a lot of blog posts targeting random keywords that are of questionable value to a real person, delete those. Google's measuring things through readers' eyes and actions now, and so should we.

I would not launch the blog on a new domain. It might be a good idea to put the blog in a new folder (ideally /blog/ unless that's where it used to live). Make sure the old posts you don't want to keep either 410 (preferable) or 404, and either keep the good posts (if any) on the same URL or 301 redirect them to the new URL. Once you've cut the section of bad content, you should hopefully see progress after a Panda refresh or two.

Please also make sure that the rest of your site is easy to navigate with a credible design and feel. Panda isn't limited to blog posts.

Many thanks for the great response Carson. This is very specific, helpful advice that we will be integrating into our overall content and marketing strategy. We very much appreciate you taking the time to address this inquiry.

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